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Lincoln and Douglas: The title match of titans

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The 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates were short on substance but long on "sound bites," Harold Holzer writes

Abraham Lincoln ran an aggressive presidential campaign, secretly purchasing a newspaper to help his bid

In the end, he and political rival Stephen A. Douglas made peace for the sake of the country

Lincoln scholar and author Harold Holzer has written and edited dozens of books on President Abraham Lincoln, including his most recent book, "Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion." Explore America's most dramatic presidential elections on CNN's "Race for the White House" Sundays at 9 p.m. ET. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN)"It's another 1860," some TV pundits have been exclaiming in their analyses of the raucous, mud-slinging presidential debates of 2016.

"It's Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas all over again."

Well, not quite.

Such comparisons conflate the long and turbulent rivalry between "Long Abe" and "The Little Giant," which originated on the brutal one-on-one political stump in rural Illinois in the 1830s, and endured in enmity for another 30 years.

Douglas, a Democrat, favored Jacksonian economic policies, which stressed decentralization of banking as a way to spur opportunity for farmers. He also supported the Mexican-American War, even if the newly acquired territory it yielded might become ripe for slavery.

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Harold Holzer

Lincoln, a Whig (long before he became a Republican), opposed the war fiercely (possibly to his political detriment) and advocated not only for a national bank, but for "internal improvements" -- the building of roads, canals, bridges and rail lines, or what today we would call "infrastructure."

These divisions were more than enough to fuel the Lincoln-Douglas competition, during which Douglas rose from Congress to the U.S. Senate, while Lincoln, whose national experience was limited to a single term in the House, limped afterward into a self-imposed political obscurity back home that lasted for almost five years.

Then, in 1854, with the slavery issue roiling politics, Douglas, now a powerful Senate committee chairman, engineered passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The new law gave white voters in new Western territories the right to vote for themselves on whether to admit or ban slavery, with no voice, of course, given to enslaved people themselves.

"Aroused," he said, as he never had been before, Lincoln came roaring back into the fray, arguing in speech after speech that slavery must be contained where it then existed and "placed on the course of ultimate extinction."

19th-century debate zingers

Lincoln and Douglas emerged as national spokesmen for these intractably different viewpoints, and their clash climaxed during the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858 -- with Lincoln challenging Douglas' bid for a third term -- and the seven three-hour debates that "set the prairies on fire."

The first debates ever transcribed by stenographers, the marathons were printed in newspapers throughout the state, achieving a breathtaking immediacy that seemed as revolutionary in its time as today's tweets and at-home access to live debate telecasts.

The debates were actually rather short on substance (slavery and conspiracy theories dominated), but were long on what today we would call "sound bites." On one occasion, Douglas accused Lincoln of hypocrisy on the issue of temperance, charging that he had once operated a "grocery" store that sold hard liquor.

If so, Lincoln drawled in retort, Douglas was surely his best customer.

When Douglas added that Lincoln was disingenuously two-faced on the slavery issue (secretly favoring black equality), Lincoln famously shot back, "If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?"

Lincoln, in turn, argued that Douglas violated the spirit of the founding fathers by denying people of color their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and in fact was part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to make slavery national and permanent.

Energized, the Republicans won the Illinois popular vote that year, but Senate elections then were decided in state legislatures, where Democrats retained a substantial advantage.

Douglas won re-election, and Lincoln, beaten, worried that he might sink into obscurity again, this time perhaps forever.

Honest Abe's political savvy

But Lincoln had a genius for what today we call public relations, and he soon dove back into the fight -- this time with his eye on the biggest prize of all, the presidency, with Douglas looming as his likeliest opponent.

Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Not one to initiate a visit to a photography gallery, Abraham Lincoln nevertheless was an accommodating subject whose portraits showed the progression of his career. This photograph by Nicholas H. Shepherd was taken in Springfield, Illinois, probably in 1846. It is the earliest known photograph of Lincoln and one of 114 portraits in the book, "The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln."

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Lincoln in Chicago, probably on October 27, 1854. The photographer was the eloquently named J.C.F. Polycarpus von Schneidau. Von Schneidau, a European immigrant who opposed slavery, got the first photograph of Lincoln in eight years. Lincoln came to understand that the reproduction of such images would enhance his career, biographer Harold Holzer noted.

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Alexander Hesler took this photograph of Lincoln in Chicago on February 28, 1857. The politician called this a "very true" portrait, "though my wife, and many others, do not (agree). My impression is that their objection arises from the disordered condition of the hair." For five generations, the Meserve-Kunhardt family has doggedly collected and protected some of the most valuable and rare Lincoln photographs and memorabilia. It all started when Frederick H. Meserve got the collecting bug when trying to find suitable images for the diary of his father, a Union soldier who met Lincoln at the Antietam battlefield in 1862.

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Lincoln in Springfield, taken by Preston Butler circa July 1858. "The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln" had a small printing in 1911 and a larger release in 1944, when poet Carl Sandburg assisted. "There have been new discoveries (since) that were not known at the time," said Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., executive director of the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation and great-great-grandson of Frederick H. Meserve.

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Lincoln in New York City on February 27, 1860. This was taken by Mathew B. Brady on the day Lincoln delivered his famous Cooper Union speech. According to Holzer, many say this photograph made Lincoln President.

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Lincoln in Washington, months after he decided to grow a beard and soon after the Civil War began in 1861. Frederick H. Meserve "understood the value in keeping his images away from any type of light," said his great-great-grandson Peter. Many were kept in closets and boxes. "Some prints have never seen the light of day."

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Lincoln is seen in Washington in this photo taken by Alexander Gardner on November 8, 1863. Lincoln is considered to be the first President photographed while in office. Because the art form was relatively still in its infancy, portrait subjects had to sit still. Of the Lincoln portraits, Holzer wrote: "No written evidence more powerfully created the 'foundation' of our estimate of Lincoln than the portraits for which he sat before the cameras of his day."

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Lincoln stands on February 9, 1864, in this photo taken by Anthony Berger. A different Berger portrait is the basis for the President's images on the penny. Peter W. Kunhardt Jr. said the recently published book has all 114 known portraits of Lincoln, though there could be more not yet discovered or publicized.

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Lincoln with his son Tad on February 5, 1865. The photo was taken by Alexander Gardner.

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Photos:A side of Lincoln you may not have seen

Lincoln in Washington, circa February 1865. The photograph is by Lewis Emory Walker. These and other images of this time show how much the President had aged during the Civil War. He was only 56 when he was assassinated two months later by John Wilkes Booth.

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Lincoln cannily organized support among Western Republicans, secretly bought a German-language newspaper to sing his praises to immigrant voters who might tilt such swing states as Illinois and Indiana, made a smash New York oratorical debut at Cooper Union in February 1860, and saw to the publication of those 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates, with friendly editing by Lincoln himself.

The book became a best-seller. When the Republican National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the nominating convention, Lincoln became the home-state favorite son -- the right man in the right place when the candidate expected to win the nod, U.S. Sen. William H. Seward of New York, faltered on the first ballot.

Two votes later, the lesser-known Lincoln was the Republican nominee.

Meanwhile, Douglas' march to the Democratic nomination hit a wall. Unlike Republicans, Democrats required their nominees to achieve two-thirds of the delegate votes. At its riotous convention in pro-slavery Charleston, South Carolina, Douglas failed to get the votes he needed. He simply wasn't conservative enough.

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Facing stalemate, Southerners walked out, started their own wing of the Democratic Party and nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge as their candidate. Douglas became the nominee of the Northern Democrats, while moderates, fearful that a Lincoln victory might split the country permanently, nominated John Bell under a new banner called the Constitutional Union Party.

In the ensuing four-way race, Lincoln was almost unable to lose. On Election Day, he swept the North and won handily in the Electoral College, even though he amassed less than 40% of the popular vote.

When presidential candidates were silent

Might such a split divide the Republican Party in 2016, as it divided the Democrats in 1860? Certainly, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that if the upcoming GOP convention renounces a popular favorite, another schism might roil the party as it did when Lincoln ran.

And don't forget that in the years since, Theodore Roosevelt, George Wallace, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader all mounted third-party challenges that arguably changed the outcome of a national race.

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Is the emotion as high, and are the divisions as wide, today, as they were in 1860? Probably not, though we like to imagine so. But things are certainly boiling over, and at each presidential debate, as stakes widen and opportunities narrow, the drama only intensifies.

But remember: As famous as the Lincoln-Douglas debates became, both in their own time and in American history, they took place during a Senate race, not a presidential campaign, and there was no sequel when the two protagonists ran against each other for the White House.

Politics may have been tumultuous in the 19th century, but back then, presidential candidates simply did not campaign directly for the White House, much less face each other one-on-one in such undignified encounters.

Lincoln stayed home and said nothing during the 1860 campaign. Douglas made one half-hearted campaign swing, using the excuse that he needed to visit his ailing mother.

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And therein lies what one of this year's presidential candidates might call a "huuuuuge" difference: the tradition of silent presidential candidates!

Here is another: When Lincoln stood outside the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 1861, to deliver his inaugural address, he removed his already famous stovepipe hat and looked helplessly for a place to set it down while he spoke.

From behind him came a hand and an offer. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, whom Lincoln had defeated for the presidency, volunteered to hold his lifelong rival's topper while the new President took the oath of office.

It was a gesture that helped unite the North to face the crisis yet to come.

Will someone hold the new president's hat on January 20, 2017 -- symbolically, of course? Time will tell.